CMS backs patients in MU Stage 2 requirements

If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend this year’s HIMSS12 conference (don’t worry…I wasn’t either), you may have missed some important announcements about new requirements and new time lines for Stage 2 Meaningful Use. Published in a proposal on the Federal Register website (you can access it here), these new requirements seem to begin involving the patient as a key contributor to the health care process. Some quick facts of Stage 2:

Stage 2 Delay: while initially, Stage 2 was delayed to 2013, because of some modifications to proposed requirements, CMS is proposing to further delay Stage 2 to 2014, giving developers and vendors ample time to create solutions that meat meaningful use criteria.

The “Provide patients with an electronic copy of their health record” now turns into “electronic/online access.” PHR/Patient Portal anyone?

Information follows the patient: an increase in demands on HIEs (Health Information Exchanges) in both Stage 2 and Stage 3 will see a tremendous market increase in HIE companies. Maybe the concept will finally get its proof!

Stage 3 Meaningful Use will include patient self-management tools.

A new proposed Stage Meaningful Use Time Frame was published as seen below.

While the proposed document has many many more pages that you can go through (in fact, it you have a serious stake in Meaningful Use, you probably should), the future of HealthIT from a patient perspective seems to be getting better faster than expected.